The Times Are Never So Bad (23 page)

‘Keep cool.'

‘I've never—' She stopped, called McCarthy, and paid for the round for Laurie and Jessie and Bobby and Mark, and tipped him a dollar. Two thousand dollars: she had never seen that much money in her life, had never had as much as a hundred in her hands at one time: not of her own.

‘
Last
call.' McCarthy started at the other end of the bar, taking empty glasses, bringing back drinks. ‘
Last
call.' She watched McCarthy pouring her last shot and draft of the night; she faced Wayne and raised the glass of tequila: ‘Hi, babe.'

‘Hi.' He licked salt from his hand.

‘I been forgetting the salt,' she said, and drank, looking at his eyes. She sipped this last one, finished it, and was drinking the beer when McCarthy called: ‘That's
it
. I'm taking the glasses in
five min
utes. You don't have to go home—'

‘—but you can't stay here,' someone said.

‘Right. Drink up.'

She finished the beer and beckoned with her finger to McCarthy. When he came she held his hands and said: ‘Just a quick one?'

‘I can't.'

‘Just half a draft or a quick shot? I'll drink it while I put my coat on.'

‘The cops have been checking. I got to have the glasses off the bar.'

‘What about a roader?' Wayne said.

‘Then they'll all want one.'

‘Okay. He's right, Anna. Let go of the man.'

She released his hands and he took their glasses. She put on her coat. Wayne was waving at people, calling to them. She waved: ‘
see
you people. Good
night
, Jessie. Laurie. Good
night
. See you, Henry. Mark. Bobby. Bye-bye, Mitch—'

Then she was in the falling white cold, her arm around Wayne; he drove them home, a block and a turn around the Chevrolet lot, then two blocks, while in her mind still were the light and faces and voices of the bar. She held his waist going up the dark stairs. He was breathing hard, not talking. Then he unlocked the door, she was inside, lights coming on, coat off, following Wayne to the kitchen where he opened their one beer and took a swallow and handed it to her and pulled money from both pockets. They sat down and divided the bills into stacks of twenties and tens and fives and ones. When the beer was half gone he left and came back from the bedroom with four Quaaludes and she said: ‘Mmmm' and took two from his palm and swallowed them with beer. She picked up the stack of twenties. Her legs felt weak again. She was hungry. She would make a sandwich. She put down the stack and sat looking at the money. He was counting: ‘—thirty-five forty forty-five fifty—' She took the ones. She wanted to start at the lowest and work up; she did not want to know how many twenties there were until the end. She counted aloud and he told her not to.

‘You don't either,' she said. ‘All I hear is ninety-five hundred ninety-five hundred—'

‘Okay. In our heads.'

She started over. She wanted to eat and wished for a beer and lost count again. Wayne had a pencil in his hand, was writing on paper in front of him. She counted faster. She finished and picked up the twenties. She counted slowly, making a new stack on the table with the bills that she drew, one at a time, from her hand. She did not keep track of the sum of money; she knew she was too drunk. She simply counted each bill as she smacked it onto the pile. Wayne was writing again, so she counted the last twelve aloud, ending with: ‘—and forty -
six
,' slamming it onto the fanning twenties. He wrote and drew a line and wrote again and drew another line, and his pencil moved up the columns, touching each number and writing a new number at the bottom until there were four of them, and he read to her: ‘Two thousand and eighteen.'

The Quaalude bees were in her head now, and she stood and went to the living room for a cigarette in her purse, her legs wanting to go to the sink at her right but she forced them straight through the door whose left jamb they bumped; as she reached into her purse she heard herself humming. She had thought she was talking to Wayne, but that was in her head, she had told him
Two thousand and eighteen we can have some music and movies now
and she smiled aloud because it had come out as humming a tune she had never heard. In the kitchen Wayne was doing something strange. He had lined up their three glasses on the counter by the sink and he was pouring milk into them; it filled two and a half, and he drank that half. Then he tore open the top of the half-gallon carton and rinsed it and swabbed it out with a paper towel. Then he put the money in it, and folded the top back, and put it in the freezer compartment, and the two glasses of milk in the refrigerator. Then she was in the bedroom talking about frozen money; she saw the cigarette between her fingers as she started to undress, in the dark now; she was not aware of his turning out lights: she was in the lighted kitchen, then in the dark bedroom, looking for an ashtray instead of pulling her sleeve over the cigarette, and she told him about that and about a stereo and Emmylou Harris and fucking, as she found the ashtray on the floor by the bed, which was a mattress on the floor by the ashtray; that she thought about him at Sunnycorner, got horny for him; her tongue was thick, slower than her buzzing head, and the silent words backed up in the spaces between the spoken ones, so she told him something in her mind, then heard it again as her tongue caught up; her tongue in his mouth now, under the covers on the cold sheet, a swelling of joy in her breast as she opened her legs for him and the night's images came back to her: the money on the table and the faces of McCarthy and Curt and Mitch and Lou, and Wayne's hand disappearing with the money inside the carton, and Bobby and Mark and Laurie and Jessie, the empty sidewalk where she stood alone in the cold air, Lou saying:
You'd be good at it
.

The ringing seemed to come from inside her skull, insistent and clear through the voices of her drunken sleep: a ribbon of sound she had to climb, though she tried to sink away from it. Then her eyes were open and she turned off the alarm she did not remember setting; it was six o'clock and she was asleep again, then wakened by her alarmed heartbeat: all in what seemed a few seconds, but it was ten minutes to seven, when she had to be at work. She rose with a fast heart and a headache that made her stoop gingerly for her clothes on the floor and shut her eyes as she put them on. She went into the kitchen: the one empty beer bottle, the ashtray, the milk-soiled glass, and her memory of him putting away the money was immediate, as if he had just done it and she had not slept at all. She took the milk carton from the freezer. The folded money, like the bottle and ashtray and glass, seemed part of the night's drinking, something you cleaned or threw away in the morning. But she had no money and she needed aspirins and coffee and doughnuts and cigarettes; she took a cold five-dollar bill and put the carton in the freezer, looked in the bedroom for her purse and then in the kitchen again and found it in the living room, opened her wallet and saw money there. She pushed the freezer money in with it and slung the purse from her shoulder and stepped into the dim hall, shutting the door on Wayne's snoring. Outside she blinked at sun and cold and remembered Wayne giving her twenty at the bar; she crossed the street and parking lot and, with the taste of beer in her throat and toothpaste in her mouth, was in the Sunnycorner before seven.

She spent the next eight hours living the divided life of a hangover. Drinking last night had stopped time, kept her in the present until last call forced on her the end of a night, the truth of tomorrow; but once in their kitchen counting money, she was in the present again and she stayed there through twice waking, and dressing, and entering the store and relieving Eddie, the all-night clerk, at the register. So for the first three or four hours while she worked and waited and talked, her body heavily and slowly occupied space in those brightly lit moments in the store; but in her mind were images of Wayne leaving the car and going into the drugstore and running out, and driving home through falling snow, the closed package store and the drinks and people at Timmy's and taking the Quaaludes from Wayne's palm, and counting money and making love for so drunk long; and she felt all of that and none of what she was numbly doing. It was a hangover that demanded food and coffee and cigarettes. She started the day with three aspirins and a Coke. Then she smoked and ate doughnuts and drank coffee. Sometimes from the corner of her eye she saw something move on the counter, small and grey and fast, like the shadow of a darting mouse. Her heart was fast too, and the customers were fast and loud, while her hands were slow, and her tongue was, for it had to wait while words freed themselves from behind her eyes, where the pain was, where the aspirins had not found it. After four cups of coffee, her heart was faster and hands more shaky, and she drank another Coke. She was careful, and made no mistakes on the register; with eyes trying to close she looked into the eyes of customers and Kermit, the manager, slim and balding, in his forties; a kind man but one who, today, made her feel both scornful and ashamed, for she was certain he had not had a hangover in twenty years. Around noon her blood slowed and her hands stopped trembling, and she was tired and lightheaded and afraid; it seemed there was always someone watching her, not only the customers and Ker-mit, but someone above her, outside the window, in the narrow space behind her. Now there were gaps in her memory of last night: she looked at the clock so often that its hands seemed halted, and in her mind she was home after work, in bed with Wayne, shuddering away the terrors that brushed her like a curtain windblown against her back.

When she got home he had just finished showering and shaving, and she took him to bed with lust that was as much part of her hangover as hunger and the need to smoke were; silent and hasty, she moved toward that orgasm that would bring her back to some calm mooring in the long day. Crying out, she burst into languor; slept breathing the scent of his washed flesh. But she woke alone in the twilit room and rose quickly from the bed, calling him. He came smiling from the living room, and asked if she were ready to go to the mall.

The indoor walk of the mall was bright and warm; coats unbuttoned, his arm over her shoulder, hers around his waist, they moved slowly among people and smells of frying meat, stopping at windows to look at shirts and coats and boots; they took egg rolls to a small pool with a fountain in its middle and sat on its low brick wall; they ate pizza alone on a bench that faced a displayed car; they had their photographs taken behind a curtain in a shop and paid the girl and left their address.

‘You think she'll mail them to us?' Anna said.

‘Sure.'

They ate hamburgers standing at the counter, watching the old man work at the grill, then sat on a bench among potted plants to smoke. On the way to the department store they bought fudge, and the taste of it lingered, sweet and rich in her mouth, and she wanted to go back for another piece, but they were in the store: large, with glaring white light, and as the young clerk wearing glasses and a thin moustache came to them, moving past television sets and record players, she held Wayne's arm. While the clerk and Wayne talked, she was aware of her gapped and jutting teeth, her pea jacket, and old boots and jeans. She followed Wayne following the clerk; they stopped at a shelf of record players. She shifted her eyes from one to the other as they spoke; they often looked at her, and she said: Yes. Sure. The soles of her feet ached and her calves were tired. She wanted to smoke but was afraid the clerk would forbid her. She swallowed the taste of fudge. Then she was sad. She watched Wayne and remembered him running out of the drugstore and, in the car, saying
Jesus Christ
, and she was ashamed that she was sad, and felt sorry for him because he was not.

Now they were moving. He was hugging her and grinning and his thigh swaggered against her hip, and they were among shelved television sets. Some of them were turned on, but to different channels, and surrounded by those faces and bodies and colliding words, she descended again into her hangover. She needed a drink, a cigarette, a small place, not all this low-ceilinged breadth and depth, where shoppers in the awful light jumped in and out of her vision. Timmy's: the corner of the bar near the door, and a slow-sipped tequila salty dog and then one more to close the spaces in her brain and the corners of her vision, stop the tingling of her gums, and the crawling tingle inside her body as though ants climbed on her veins. In her coat pocket, her hand massaged the box of cigarettes; she opened it with a thumb, stroked filters with a finger.

‘That's a good advertisement for the Sony,' Wayne said. ‘Turning on the RCA next to it.'

She wanted to cry. She watched the pictures on the Sony: a man and woman in a car, talking; she knew California from television and movies, and they were driving in California: the winding road, the low brown hills, the sea. The man was talking about dope and people's names. The clerk was talking about a guarantee. Wayne told him what he liked to watch, and as she heard hockey and baseball and football and movies she focused so hard on imagining this set in their apartment and them watching it from the couch that she felt like she had closed her eyes, though she had not. She followed them to the cash register and looked around the room for the cap and shoulders of a policeman to appear in the light that paled skin and cast no shadow. She watched Wayne counting the money; she listened to the clerk's pleased voice. Then Wayne had her arm, was leading her away.

‘Aren't we taking them?'

He stopped, looked down at her, puzzled; then he laughed and kissed the top of her head.

‘We pick them up out back.'

He was leading her again.

‘Where are we going now?'

‘Records. Remember? Unless you want to spend a fucking fortune on a stereo and just look at it.'

Standing beside him, she gazed and blinked at album covers as he flipped them forward, pulled out some, talked about them. She tried to despise his transistor radio at home, tried to feel her old longing for a stereo and records, but as she looked at each album he held in front of her, she was glutted with spending, and felt more like a thief than she had last night waiting outside the drugstore, and driving home from it. Again she imagined the apartment, saw where she would put the television, the record player; she would move the chest of drawers to the living room and put them on its top, facing the couch where—She saw herself cooking. She was cooking macaroni and cheese for them to eat while they watched a movie; but she saw only the apartment now, then herself sweeping it. Wayne swept it too, but often he either forgot or didn't see what she saw or didn't care about it. Sweeping was not hard but it was still something to do, and sometimes for days it seemed too much to do, and fluffs of dust gathered in corners and under furniture. So now she asked Wayne and he looked surprised and she was afraid he would be angry, but then he smiled and said Okay. He brought the records to the clerk and she watched the numbers come up on the register and the money going into the clerk's hand. Then Wayne led her past the corners and curves of washers and dryers, deeper into the light of the store, where she chose a round blue Hoover vacuum cleaner.